In the schoolyard
Several background stories on guns and law enforcement have contributed to flavor one new item on a target practice company, giving the story more buzz than it might otherwise have gotten. The background stories are:
1. The recent holding of practice “realistic urban drills” in by US military forces in American cities.
This was defended as “only taking place on defunct military bases” with a link to this site. But the news at that site says otherwise, about a drill held around “the old jail” in Galveston, Texas. Could someone have been confused thinking “the old jail” mean “abandoned military base”? In any event, other drills match the same pattern of taking place in civilian populations. The same link mentions an apology for concerns raised during a drill in Houston.
And there is this video news report of a drill in Miami. That news report shows the indoctrination of the media in the recent gun rights restriction push: Instead of “military helicopters,” the reporter called them “military-style helicopters.” He also described (and showed a video of) the choppers “firing blanks” at the roads below, “pinging off the nearby hi-rises.”
American military forces have always conducted training in the US, including training involving (and sometimes including) foreign forces. But the Obama administration is ramping up the scale, as well as the proximity to civilians. Federal laws enacted after the Civil War prohibit the use of the US national military for any law enforcement purpose inside the US, so one could argue that what these exercises train for is not permitted anyway. (Though the concept of large amounts of troops deployed in the US for “national emergencies” was actually implemented at the end of the Bush administration, based upon a Clinton-era plan.)
And the Obama administration’s recent inclusion of invited Russian special forces in joint training exercises in the US strikes an odd note in this context.
2. The purchase of more than a billion rounds of ammunition by various federal agencies.
This got some attention in recent weeks from a range of folks from bloggers to Investor’s Business Daily - whereupon the “most transparent administration in US history” immediately redacted the amounts of ammunition being purchased. Already-published numbers, however, show that at least 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition have been sought or purchased.
Much of that ammunition is hollow-point rounds which are not generally used for target practice, and are intended for unarmored human targets.
The official story now is that these purchases were made to secure good prices on ammo., and for target qualification. One pundit calculated that this is enough ammo for more than a century at prior published usage (or decades of fighting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars together at their peak rates).
And the shelf life of the ammo would be exceeded. While bullets in general can last for years and even decades, US government practice is not to plan for this. During Desert Storm, for example, they re-worked .50 caliber bullets that had gone unreliable over a period of decades - which left them with a high failure rate still (from poorly replaced primers).
3. The proposed restrictions on gun purchases by law-abiding citizens.
These continue to be pressed, at the federal and state level, despite the fact that the proposers know (and some have admitted) that they would not have stopped incidents like the Sandy Hook or Columbine or Virginia Tech shootings.
The Virginia Tech shooter used ordinary handguns and regular magazines. A seven-bullet magazine restriction would not have fazed him at all. Columbine was intended as a school bombing, with the shooting aspect entirely incidental. The diversionary bomb went off, a couple of miles away, but the actual school bombs fortunately failed to explode. And again, they had plenty of time, and the distinction between handgun and rifle (or in their case, shotgun) was of no consequence.
One survivor of that shooting wrote a letter to President Obama, noting the futility (and inappropriateness!) of the gun restriction movement.
Target: America
With these things in mind, I thought about the surfacing last week of a company’s new line of law enforcement practice shooting targets. The company, Law Enforcement Targets, has hundreds of images in their inventory, from monsters to aliens to workplace violence to home invasion scenarios.
The new ones are different: They are civilians, who (other than aiming a gun) are very ordinary in appearance. An older gentleman with a shotgun, a pregnant woman with a handgun, a young boy with a “real gun,” and a gun-armed girl, and a mother with child. And an older woman indoors, in her robe, armed with a pistol. Most of these seem to be on private property.
According to the company, these targets - pregnant women, mothers, children, older Americans - were specifically requested by law enforcement. And their large contract is with the federal government, including the Department of Homeland Security. The same folks stocking up on hundreds of millions of rounds of ammo allegedly “for target qualification”:
One aspect that caught my attention was the mother-with-child image, second from the right. The symbols on her t-shirt seem more Greek than Hebrew to me, but she is wearing a large yellow star of David on her shorts. Since all these poses are staged or created, what caused the company to decide to create this particular image, in which the “target” citizen’s religion is featured? This line of targets is called the “No More Hesitation” series, requested (they say) to train shooters not to hesitate when necessary to fire at older/very young/pregnant or frail Americans.
And Jewish women.
This seems like a dubious motivation to me. Others agreed. By the weekend, the company had received so much feedback that the series was taken down. You can still see their hundreds of other targets, if you’re interested.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Originally published at DeHavelle.com. You can comment here or there.